On the Pallium

Let the matter now be taken from elsewhere, lest it blush or grieve among Phoenicians before Romans. Certainly to change one's dress is the solemn gift of all nature. Even this world itself upon which we tread performs that office in the meantime. Let Anaximander look to it, if he thinks there are more worlds; let whoever else anywhere babbles of Meropes to Midas's ears, like Silenus—tales suited indeed to larger fables. But even if Plato esteems some world of which this one is the image, that one too must needs change in like manner. For if the world consists of diverse substances and functions after the fashion of what this world is—for it is not a world unless it is likewise as a world—things diverse in one, by reason of their mutual change, are diverse. In fine, alternation reconciles the discord of diversity. Thus by changing, the whole world will be, being both compacted of diversities and tempered by forces.

Our own region at least—which is plain even to eyes wholly or entirely Homeric—is wholly changeable in form. Day and night turn about in succession. The sun varies with its annual stations, the moon with its monthly modulations. The scattered confusion of the stars now and then casts something down, now and then raises it up again. The circuit of the sky is now bright under clear air, now foul under cloud; or rains pour down, or if there are any missiles along with the rains, then drizzle follows, and again fair weather. So too the sea has an ill reputation for faithfulness, while with winds equally shifting, it troubles one from calm into roughness, from roughness into something moderate, and straightway from great waves into unrest. So too if you review the earth, which loves to be clothed season by season, you would be near to denying it is the same earth when, remembering it green, you behold it golden, and will soon laugh to see it white.

What else do all its other adornments not change one into another—the ridges of mountains as they run down, the veins of springs as they trickle away, the courses of rivers as they silt up? The whole globe too was changed at one time, covered over by all the waters. Still today sea-shells and trumpets wander on the mountains, eager to prove to Plato that even the heights once floated. But also, swimming out again, the globe changed once more in form, the same yet different.

It changes even now locally in its dress, when its situation is damaged: when among the islands Delos is no more, Samos is sand, and (if that man is not a liar) when something equal to Libya or Asia is sought in the Atlantic and not found; when what was once the flank of Italy, seized midway by the battering of the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian, makes Sicily its remnant; when that whole tract of the cleavage, twisting back the contentious meetings of the waters into a narrow passage, imbues the sea with a new vice—not casting out shipwrecks but devouring them. The dry land too suffers from the sky or from itself. Look toward Palestine, where the river Jordan is the arbiter of the stream—a vast desolation, a bereft region, a field to no purpose; yet formerly there were cities, and thronging peoples, and it heard only God; then, when God acted as censor, impiety earned showers of fire.

So far Sodom, and Gomorrah is no more, and all is ashes, and the neighboring sea lives death together with the soil. From a like cloud Tuscany's Volsinii was burned, so that Campania might the more hope from its mountains, having been snatched away—Pompeii. But let that be. Would that Asia too were now secure from the gulping of the soil! Would that Africa had feared the chasm but once, expiated by the loss of a single encampment! Many other disasters of this kind have changed the dress of the globe and shifted its situations. That wars too have had very great power, and sadness will go on reviewing them, no less than the vicissitudes of kingdoms. How often have these too changed, from Ninus the offspring of Belus onward!—if indeed Ninus reigned first, as the profanity of earlier writers maintains: for with you the pen is not usually accustomed to go much further back.

From the Assyrians, perhaps, the histories of the age lie open; but we who read the divine writings are acquainted with them from the very birth of the world. But I prefer now to speak of glad things: for glad things too change. In fine, whatever the sea has washed away, the sky has burned, the earth has swallowed, the sword has shorn—it returns elsewhere, compensated by a fresh supply. For at the beginning the earth was largely empty and void of men, and wherever some people had settled, it was for themselves alone. And so it began to cultivate everything (if you understand at last the meaning of abundance crowding in one place and deserting another), to weed and to till, so that from there, as from shoots and layers, peoples from peoples, cities from cities, might be planted throughout the whole world. Swarms of overflowing nations flew across.

The Scythians overflow into the Persians; the Phoenicians belch forth into Africa; the Phrygians beget the Romans; the seed of the Chaldeans is led into Egypt; then, when it is brought back from there, it becomes the Jewish people. So too the posterity of Hercules, together with Temenus, produce their line by occupying the Peloponnese. So too the Ionians, companions of Neleus, furnish Asia with new cities. So too the Corinthians with Archias fortify Syracuse. But antiquity is now vain, when our own careers are before us. How much has this age reformed the world! How many cities the threefold virtue of the present empire has either produced, or enlarged, or restored, God favoring so many Augusti in one! How many census-rolls transferred! How many peoples brought back within bounds! How many orders distinguished! How many barbarians shut out!

Truly the world is the most cultivated estate of this empire, with every aconite of hostility eradicated, and the cactus and briar of treacherous familiarity, trodden down and made pleasant beyond the orchard of Alcinous and the rose-garden of Midas.

Praising therefore a world that changes, why do you mark out man? Beasts too change their form in place of dress: although the peacock's plumage is itself a dress, and indeed one of the richest dyes; nay, deeper than any purple shell at the neck where it blooms; and more gilded than any embroidered border where the back shines; and more flowing than any trailing robe where the tails lie spread; many-colored, and differently colored, and ever-shifting in color; never itself, always other; and if always itself when it is other, then to be changed as often as it is to be moved. The serpent too must be named, though he comes after the peacock: for he too transforms what has been allotted to him—his skin and his age.

For as soon as he has felt old age, he squeezes himself into a narrow place, and entering a cave at the same time, scraped bare from the very threshold itself, leaving his sloughed skin there, he unfolds himself anew: along with his scales his years too are refused. The hyena, if you observe, has an annual sex; it alternates male and female. I say nothing of the stag, who is himself the arbiter of his own age, and, feeding on serpents, grows faint with venom into youth again. There is also a four-footed creature, slow-moving, wild, low, rough—do you think it is Pacuvius's tortoise?

It is not: the little beast also captures a verse from other creatures, quite middling in size, but bearing a great name; when you have heard the name chamæleon, not knowing it before, you will already fear something greater than a lion, but when you come upon it near a vineyard, mostly under a vine-leaf, all of it, you will immediately laugh at the boldness and the Greekness of the name; for there is no moisture in the body, as is plain from creatures far smaller. The chamæleon lives on its little skin: its small head is set directly from the back, for it lacks a neck; and so it is hard to turn back, but it spins its protruding little eyes—nay, mere points of light—in a circle; sluggish, weary, it barely lifts itself from the ground, labors at its gait in a daze and advances, showing a step rather than unfolding one, always fasting and never failing, it feeds by gaping, it ruminates by puffing, its food is wind.

Yet even the chamæleon has the power to change wholly, though into nothing else. For since it has one proper color of its own, it is suffused from whatever comes near it. This alone has been granted to the chamæleon, which is commonly said—to play upon its own skin. Much had to be said, so that by way of preparation one might arrive at man. Him too you receive from the beginning: he stood before his maker naked and unclothed; afterward he obtains wisdom, snatched before it was yet permitted. Thereupon, hastening to cover what in his new body was not yet owed to modesty, he wraps himself for the time being in fig-leaves; then when he is banished from the place of his origin, he is given to the world clothed in skins, as to a mine. But these are mysteries not for everyone to know.

I believe now from your own tradition—what the Egyptians relate, and Alexander sets forth, and the mother reads at that season of Osiris, when Ammon comes to him out of Libya, rich in sheep. In fine, since they themselves say that Mercury, by chance delighted by the soft touch of a stroked ram, flayed the little sheep; and while he was feeling it, and, as the ease of the material suggested, drawing out the thread in a continuous pull after the manner of a former rope which he had joined as far as the bast, it ran out.

But you preferred to assign all the management of wool and the construction of webs to Minerva, though the more diligent workshop belongs to Arachne. Next comes the material; and I speak not of Milesian and Selgic and Altine sheep, or of what Tarentum or Baetica washes out, with nature providing the colour, but since also shrubs clothe us, and the grassy flax after its greenness grows white through washing; and it was not enough to plant and sow a tunic, unless it also came to pass that clothing could be fished: for even from the sea come fleeces, whereby the more spreading shells of mossy linen-like growth adorn themselves. Nor indeed is the silkworm hidden from view—it is a kind of little worm, which by spinning through the air, more fittingly than the horoscopes of spiders, stretches its dwelling, then devours it, and presently renders it from its belly—so that if you kill it, you will wind threads already animate.

So great a preparation of materials, then, the arts of weaving also followed: first promulgating various forms of garments, as necessity led the way in covering man, and then also in adorning him, nay even in puffing him up as ambition succeeded; of which forms, some are inhabited by particular peoples and are not shared with others; but some are indiscriminately useful to all, like this pallium—and if it is more Greek, yet the language is now in the possession of Latium: it entered with the name of the garment. And indeed he himself who used to assess the Greeks beyond the city walls, being already an old man trained in their letters and speech, that same Cato, baring his shoulder in his own time in the manner of a jurist, favoured the Greeks no less in the pallium-clad fashion. What now, if Romanness is salvation for all, yet you do not attain to the Greeks even by honourable means?

Or, if it is not so, whence comes it that in the provinces better cultivated, which nature has fitted rather for wrestling with the soil, the pursuits of the palaestra grow old to no purpose, and labour in vain, and the muddy anointing, and the dusty rolling, and the dry fattening? Whence among some Numidians, even with their horses mane-haired, does the barber work close to the skin, and only the top of the blade is formidable? Whence among the shaggy and bristly, so greedy a resin from the buttocks, so thieving a tweezer from the chin? It is a prodigy that these things are done without the pallium. All this business belongs to Asia. What have Libya and Europe to do with the gymnastic elegances, which you know not how to clothe? For in truth, who is there that is more Greek in being depilated than in being dressed?

To transfer one's dress is nearly a fault only if nature, not custom, is changed. There is sufficient difference between honouring the time and reverencing nature. Let custom give credence to time, nature to God. Nature, then, the Larissaean hero shook to its foundations by changing into a maiden: he who was reared on the marrow of wild beasts—whence also the composition of his name, since his lips had been empty of the taste of the breast; he who was educated in a rocky school among a cave-dweller and forest-haunter and monstrous instructor. Wild beasts, if in boyhood he endured his mother's solicitude, certainly already a little actor, certainly already having secretly performed a man's part for someone, he still endures to spread out the stola, to arrange his hair, to paint his skin, to consult the mirror, to stroke his neck, his ear also effeminated by piercing, which the round ornament at Sigeum preserves for him. Plainly he is a soldier afterwards: for necessity restored his sex.

The battle had sounded, and arms were not far off. The very steel, it is said, draws the man to it. But if even after the incentive he had persisted as a girl, he could also have married. Behold therefore the transformation, a double monstrosity indeed—from man a woman, then from woman a man—when neither should the truth have been denied, nor the deception confessed. Each change of dress was bad: the one against nature, the other against safety. More shamefully still did lust transfigure a man by dress than any maternal fear, although he is worshipped by you who ought rather to blush—that bearer of quiver and arrows and club, who compensated the whole lot of his epithets with womanly attire. So much did the secret Lydian woman avail, that Hercules was prostituted in Omphale, and Omphale in Hercules. Where is Diomedes, and the bloody mangers? Where is Busiris and the funeral altars? Where is Geryon, three in one? His club preferred to reek still with their brains, when it was drenched with perfumes.

The old blood of the Hydra and the Centaurs on his arrows was shut out by the pumice of the mirror, with luxury mocking, so that after the monsters were transfixed, they might perhaps sew a garland. Not even the shoulders of a sober woman or some virago could have entered beneath the spoils of so great a beast, unless they had been long softened and weakened and scented—which I trust was done at Omphale's with balsam or oil of quince. I believe too that his mane submitted to the comb. Lest the enervated neck be branded by the Scirian lion-skin, the gaping mouth was stuffed with hair, and the cheek-teeth shadowed among the side-locks. The whole face's shame would bellow, if it could: Nemea certainly, if any genius of the place, was groaning: for then it looked around and perceived it had lost its lion. What that Hercules in Omphale's silk was like, Omphale already designated and described, arrayed in Hercules' hide.

But also the boxer Cleomachus, who had come before the Tirynthian, after at Olympia he had flowed with incredible transformation from male, cut within the skin and beyond, was now to be crowned among the fullers of Novius, and deservedly commemorated by the mime-writer Lentulus in his Catinenses—just as he had occupied the traces of the cestus for men, so also he thrust out the rough endromis with some soft silken synthesis. Physcon and Sardanapalus must be passed over in silence, who, were it not for their notorious lusts, no one would know as kings at all. They must be passed over in silence, lest they in turn mutter something about certain of your Caesars, equally shameful: lest perchance it be entrusted to canine frankness to point out a Caesar more impure than Physcon and softer than Sardanapalus—and indeed a Sub-Nero. Nor is the force of vain glory less warm in changing garments, even with the man still safe.

Every passion is heat: but when it is fanned into affectation, it is already a burning from the fire of glory. You have therefore, from this tinder, a great king blazing—lesser only in glory. He had conquered the Median nation, and was conquered by Median dress. Having put aside the triumphal coat of mail, he departed in captive trousers: his breast, carved with the imprints of scales, he bared to covering by a transparent weave, and still panting from the work of war, he quenched it, as though for greater softness, with waving silk. The swelling Macedonian was not sufficiently puffed up in spirit, unless an even more inflated garment had cast him down. Except that I think even the philosophers themselves affect something of this kind. For I hear of one who philosophised in purple. If a philosopher in purple, why not also in sandals? To be shod in Tyrian unless with gold is not at all Greek. Someone will say: but another walked both in silk and with a bronze-soled slipper?

Worthily indeed, so that with his garments clashing like bacchantes, something might tinkle beneath—he walked like a cymbal. But if at that time and place Diogenes were barking from his tub, not with muddy feet, as the dew-walkers of Plato know, but he would have carried the whole Empedocles entirely into the inner chambers of the sewers—he who had raved that he was a heavenly being—so that, having first greeted his sisters, then men, as a god, he might do so. Those therefore who transfer their dress from nature and modesty, it is right to fix with a glance, and point out with a finger, and hand over with a nod. Plainly, if anyone trails a delicate garment along the ground with Menandrian looseness, let him hear even from the comic poet at his own expense: what a cloak is this madman wasting?

And indeed, the widespread opportunity which the long-extended intention of the censor's frown, now relaxed, offers for censure, presents freedmen in equestrian rank, the half-flogged in the liberal orders, the surrendered among the freeborn, rustics among city-dwellers, buffoons in the forum, countrymen in the military: the undertaker, the pimp, the gladiatorial trainer are clothed alongside you. Turn also to women: you have to behold what Caecina Severus pressed gravely upon the senate—matrons without the stola in public. In short, by the decrees of the augur Lentulus, whoever had so discharged herself was liable to the penalty for unchastity: since indeed the marks and guardians of dignity in dress, as impediments to the practice of harlotry, had carefully disaccustomed certain persons. But now, pandering to themselves, so that they may be more easily approached, they have renounced both the stola and the supparum and the little slipper and the hair-net, and even now the litters themselves and the chairs, by which they were kept privately domestic even in public, they have abjured.

But one person extinguishes his own lights, another kindles lights not his own. Look upon the harlots, the market-place of the people's lusts—look upon those women of ill repute themselves, and if it is better to turn one's eyes away from such shameful spectacles of chastity slain in public, yet look at least from above, and you will now see matrons. And when the mistress of a tavern fans herself with silk, and consoles her neck, more unclean than the place, with necklaces, and inserts her hands—privy to all shameful deeds—into armlets which the matrons themselves also have rashly usurped from the gifts of brave men, and draws a clean or womanly shoe upon an impure leg: why do you not look at those persons, or likewise at those habits of dress which falsely claim religious sanction for their novelty?

When all things are initiated, concealed in white, both on account of the mark of the fillet and the privilege of the cap, into the rites of Ceres: when on account of a different devotion, dark garments and gloomy fleece above the head drive men into the frenzies of Bellona: when the ambition of the broader purple and the superimposition of Gallic redness commends Saturn: when this very pallium, arranged more scrupulously, and the slipper Grecianised, pay court to Aesculapius. How much more then would you censure that, and press it with your eyes, even if already guilty of a simple and unaffected, yet still superstitious use? But indeed when this pallium first clothes that wisdom which refuses the most vain superstitions, then most assuredly the pallium above all spoils and robes is an august garment, and above all crowns and priestly head-dresses an elevated priest. Lower your eyes, I counsel you; reverence the dress of one who, for the present at least, renounces your error.

Yet, you say, thus from the toga to the pallium? For what if it were from a diadem and a sceptre? Did Anacharsis change otherwise, when he preferred philosophy to the kingdom of Scythia? Let there be no signs of one who has passed to something better, this garment does what is needed.

First, even for the simple putting on of it, it costs no weariness: so much so that there is no need even of a craftsman who the day before forms the folds from the beginning, and thence draws them down into the panels, and commits the whole contrivance of the gathered boss to guardian tongs, and then at daybreak, with the tunic first girded by a belt—which moderation it would have been better to have woven in—having again inspected the boss, and reformed whatever has gone astray, he lets part hang forward from the left, but draws back from the shoulders the sweep of it from which the fold arises, now that the panels are failing, and with the right arm excluded heaps it still further onto the left together with another equal panel devoted to the back, and so burdens the man with his clothing. Finally I shall question your own conscience: what do you feel yourself to be first when clad in the toga—clothed, or laden?

If you deny it, I shall follow you home; I shall see what you hasten to do the moment you cross the threshold. Assuredly no other garment's removal is greeted with such congratulation as the toga's. Of shoes we say nothing—the toga's own torment, the most filthy protection of the feet, and a false one at that; for whom does it not profit, in cold and heat, to be stiff-footed and bare, rather than in a shoe to be foot-bound? A great provision for walking, that the cobbler's poisonous art should furnish effeminate brogues. But the pallium is more expeditious than anything, even if doubled—which is Crates' delay, nowhere in the putting on when it is laid aside: for indeed its whole effort is to cover loosely. By a single casting around it is permitted, nowhere inhuman, and so covers all things of a man at once.

Veiling the shoulder it exposes or encloses it, otherwise it clings to the shoulder; it props nothing around, it binds nothing around, it takes no pains about the faithfulness of panels, it sets itself right easily, it restores itself easily: even when it is laid aside, it is committed to no cross for the morrow. If there is any undergarment beneath, the torment of the girdle is absent: if anything is put on shod, it is the cleanest work: or bare feet are more, certainly more manly than in shoes. This for the pallium in the meantime, as much as you have summoned it by name. But now it challenges on the matter of business as well.

I, it says, owe nothing to the forum, nothing to the campus, nothing to the senate-house: I keep watch for no duty, I pre-occupy no rostra, I haunt no praetorian courts: I do not sniff at channels, I do not adore barriers, I do not wear out benches, I do not confound laws, I do not bark out cases, I do not judge, I do not serve as a soldier; I have withdrawn from the people, my sole business is with myself, unless I care for nothing other than not to care. You would enjoy a better life more in retirement than in the open, but you will brand it as slothful. Of course one must live for fatherland and empire and the commonwealth. That was once the sentiment. No man is born for another who is to die for himself. Certainly when you come to the Epicuruses and Zenoes, you call them wise—the whole school of quietude, who consecrated it under the name of the highest and sole pleasure.

Yet almost nothing will be permitted even so to benefit the public. I am accustomed from whatever margin or altar to prescribe remedies for morals, which will confer good health upon public affairs, and upon cities and empires more happily than your labours. For indeed if I proceed with you to sharp matters, togas have harmed the commonwealth more than breastplates. Yet I flatter no vices, I spare no old ones, I overlook no scab. I apply the cautery to the ambition by which M. Tullius bought a citrus-wood table for five hundred thousand sesterces: for which Asinius Gallus counts twice as much for a table of the same Mauretanian wood. Hem, at how great a price did they value wooden spots! Likewise the ambition by which Sulla contrives dishes of a hundred pounds' weight!

I am indeed afraid lest that scale be too small, when Drusillianus—a slave of Claudius, forsooth—builds a five-hundred-pound serving-dish, perhaps necessary, as the inscription on the tables may say, for which if a workshop was erected, a dining-room too ought to have been built. I plunge the scalpel equally into that cruelty by which Vedius Pollio exposed slaves to be attacked by moray eels. Delighted, forsooth, by a novel savagery of an earthly beast, toothless, clawless, and hornless, it pleased him to press fish into service as wild beasts—to be cooked immediately thereafter, of course, so that in their entrails he himself might taste something of the bodies of his own slaves.

I shall cut away the gullet by which the orator Hortensius was the first who could kill a peacock for food: by which Aufidius Lurco was the first who corrupted bodies by force-feeding, and by compelled nourishment brought them to an adulterated flavour: by which Asinius Celer paid six sesterces for the purchase of a single mullet: by which the actor Aesopus from birds of the same costliness—such as all the melodious and talking ones—confiscated a dish of a hundred thousand. His son after such a tidbit was able to hunger more sumptuously: for he drained down a pearl, precious even by its very name, lest, I suppose, he should have dined more meanly than his father. I say nothing of Neros and Apicius and Rufus: I shall administer a purge to the impurity of Scaurus, and to the gambling of Curius, and to the drunkenness of Antony: and remember that these, among many, were meanwhile toga-wearers. What sort of men are found among the pallium?

Hardly will anyone draw out and drain these festering sores of the city, unless it be a pallium-clad discourse.

By discourse, he says, you have persuaded me, by the most wise of remedies. But even if eloquence be silent, whether withdrawn by incapacity or restrained by modesty—for philosophy is content even with a tongueless life—the very garb itself speaks. Thus at last the philosopher is heard while he is seen. By my very appearance I pour shame upon vices. Who does not suffer when he sees his rival? Who can look with his eyes upon one against whom he cannot prevail with his mind? Great is the benefit of the pallium, in the recollection of which wicked morals even blush. Let philosophy now see what profit it brings: for it is not alone with me. I have also other arts useful in public.

From my cloth are clothed both the first teacher of letters, and the first trainer of the voice, and the first reckoner of numbers in the sand, and the grammarian, and the rhetorician, and the sophist, and the physician, and the poet, and he who strikes the musical instrument, and he who interprets the stars, and he who observes the flight of birds. Every liberal pursuit of learning is covered by my four corners. Plainly, after the Roman knights—yet also the torch-bearers, and all the disgrace of swords—is paraded forth in the toga. This, forsooth, will be an indignity—from the toga to the pallium—but that is the pallium speaking. But I now confer upon it also commerce with the divine sect and discipline. Rejoice, O pallium, and exult: a better philosophy has now deigned to honour you, from the time it began to clothe the Christian.